The Empirical President

The House of Representatives has passed a massive, complex, special-interest-pocked bill that will "invest" in green energy and according to Obama and Pelosi, create "millions" of green jobs. Over and above the jobs that are lost due to higher energy prices? This is not empiricism. This is fantasy. Mayor Bloomberg talked of seeding New York with windmills. Huber cites data. "Windmills are now 50-story skyscrapers. Yet one windmill produces a piddling 2 to 3 megawatts. A jumbo jet needs 100 megawatts to get off the ground ... Meeting New York City's total energy demand would require 13,000 of those skyscrapers spinning at top speed, which would require scattering about 50,000 of them across the state..."

Instead of data, the president offers humbug. The great genius of American ingenuity, he suggests, after receiving billions in government "investments," will create new technologies for extracting usable and cheap energy from wind, solar, and geothermal sources. But if those technologies are just a wish away, why have they not been discovered already by businesses hoping to undersell oil and gas? Note that nuclear power, the one "green" source that is empirically proven to provide relatively inexpensive power without producing greenhouse gases, is not even on the president's agenda. Is this returning "science" to its rightful place? Here's an irony: If the environmentalists had not so successfully blocked nuclear power after the Three Mile Island accident (which didn't hurt a soul), the U.S. would now be in compliance with the Kyoto Protocol targets for CO2 emissions.

Huber also makes the common-sense point that by making carbon more expensive for American consumers, we will reduce demand for it and thereby make it even cheaper for Third World nations to buy. Perhaps reflecting this reality, the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledges that under Waxman-Markey, emissions of CO2 will not be reduced by the year 2020.

The Waxman/Markey bill will have little to no impact on world production of greenhouse gases, which are supposed to be responsible for global temperature increases that stopped nearly a decade ago. This massive tax increase on energy will not harm the already weakened U.S. economy; it will strengthen it. Got that? Aren't you glad we have an empirical president?!